to give an of
sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries. Not so with
the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western
entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout
as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the
strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.

The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of
a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves
against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the
classic green. You know the "Washington elm," or if you do not, you had
better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells
you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the
head of an American army. In a line with that you may see two others:
the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to that
beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along. I have
heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that the
difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the
Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of
elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the
one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs
and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its
symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second
thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the
lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the
axe finished what the lightning had begun.

The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of
clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old
house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local
inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think
that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in
it. I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I could
find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and muddy-witted
and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get my back up, like those other natives
of the soil.

I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind of
natural theology f